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or otherwise unable to take the call himself. Very quickly, he developed a concept for an electronic system to store and receive messages. His first attempt, he said, "...required 64 telephone lines, 114 Intel 8086 microprocessors and four refrigerator-sized 200-megabyte hard drives." The hard part would be to find a company willing to buy an untested system.
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called "Voice
Message Exchange," U.S. Patent No. 4,371,752, and was a significant patent for voicemail. While there was prior art for voicemail, Matthews' patent was never adjudicated and held up until its expiration. Matthews eventually held over thirty-five patents, many of which related to voicemail.
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Matthews has said that the inspiration for his invention came in 1970, while visiting a client's office on business. He noticed a number of trash bins overflowing with message slips used by receptionists and secretaries to inform their bosses that someone tried to call him while he was in a meeting
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Matthews' involvement in trying to mesh human voices to technology was many years in the making. A fellow friend and pilot perished in a mid-air collision, which
Matthews believed was caused when he momentarily took his eyes off of his plane's controls to adjust his radio frequency. After he was
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In 1979, Gordon
Matthews founded a company in Texas called ECS Communications. The first VMX system was engineered by John Cayton under the direction of Gordon Matthews. In 1979, Matthews also filed a method patent for voicemail, which was granted on February 1, 1983. Matthews patented what was
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Matthews later changed the name of his company to VMX Inc. He eventually developed a 3,000-user voice messaging system called the VMX/64. VMX was arguably the first company to offer voicemail for sale commercially for corporate use. Matthews was able to sell his system to several notable large
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While some claim that VMX and Gordon
Matthews invented voicemail or that he was the "father of voicemail", this claim is not true. The first inventor of record was Stephen Boies of IBM in 1973, six years before Matthews filed his first patent. IBM released its first implementation of
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By 1990, articles in the popular press complained about, "..."voice mail jail" – being trapped in a labyrinthine series of telephone prompts that never seemed to lead to a human.
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in 1975, four years before VMX was launched. SMS was later called Audio
Distribution System (ADS). Also, Delphi Communications of California first released their
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to help develop voice-activated cockpit controls which would help lessen similar types of catastrophic errors in the future. After IBM, Matthews went to work for
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While executive productivity may have improved, many secretarial and administrative jobs were eliminated;
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Paper notices about calls were eliminated, but VM did not necessarily improve call-backs by recipients;
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Matthews was 65, and was survived by his wife, Monika, son Gordon, and only daughter, Christina.
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Matthews presented his concept at a conference attended by a
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (
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In general, executives loved the voice mail systems, however time revealed some downsides:
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engaged in producing teleconferencing equipment. In 2002, VTEL renamed itself
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Information technology (IT) employees were needed to maintain the VM system.
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Pace, Eric. "Gordon
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In 2001, he became an executive of VTEL Corporation, a company based in
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system in 1976, three years before the first patent filing by
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In 1988, when VMX was on the verge of bankruptcy, it was acquired by
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One source said that the company name stood for Voice Mail
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On-line interview with
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discharged from the military, Matthews went to work for
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351:"Gordon Matthews Invented Voicemail in Dallas."
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